This is a column I wrote on the Israel-Hamas war and was published in the local newspaper in Oak Park, IL

No one wins the ‘blame game’

by Stephanie Ferrera December 12, 2023

A monumental tragedy, the war between Hamas and Israel, is now in its third month. Many responses to the horrific conflict have been ones of blame and side-taking. Ken Trainor asks: “Who is to blame? Who isn’t?”

His column of Dec. 6, “Blame game in the messy Mideast,” is one of the few commentaries I have seen that looks beyond blame to try to understand the roots of this deep and seemingly insoluble conflict. He takes it back through thousands of years of history and to the “mythology chronicled in the Book of Genesis, a wild and turbulent melodrama of family divisions and intrigue.”

He places the events that began on Oct. 7 into a broad, historical, systemic perspective. I believe that looking at conflict in that larger context is essential if we are ever going to be able to understand what drives the extremes of destructiveness of which humans are capable.

For me, the lens of Bowen Family Systems Theory, developed by psychiatrist Murray Bowen, has been an enlightening guide to understanding how we humans get into conflict and how it escalates. Looking at the emotional process that drives conflict, Bowen drew parallels between conflict on a family level and conflict within and between larger groups and whole societies. When anxiety increases in a family or in a society, the functioning of the system is vulnerable to regression in the following way: emotion dominates thinking so that the intellectual system is more geared to winning than to finding an accord with the opponent. Polarization is intense and people find it hard to find a middle ground. There is a sense of stalemate and discouragement, as well as increasing danger that the conflict will spread.

Every conflict in history is unique and deserves to be understood in its own historical and cultural context, with its own set of facts: people, places, issues, events. Relationships within and between societies are magnitudes more complex than family relationships, yet from the perspective of emotional process they are families writ large. Stripped of the myriad details that make each conflict unique, it is possible to observe an underlying emotional process that is common to all.

All the anxiety-driven patterns that Bowen observed in families are involved in large-scale conflict. Reciprocal grievances, blame, attack, defense, and retaliation drive people to increased polarization. Each side seeks allies, and more people are drawn into the conflict. The result is side-taking and projection of the problem to the other side, thus creating the divided “us-them” system. As conflict expands, civil contact between opposing sides becomes increasingly difficult. Emotional cutoff intensifies unity among “us” and isolation from “them,” which in turn fuels the projection process and fear of the other.       

Large-scale conflict is multi-lateral; as more people are drawn into it, issues and competing interests multiply; more splinters and factions emerge. As current issues activate memories of old grievances, people who have lived together as neighbors turn against one another. Large-scale conflict is also multigenerational. Children born into a divided emotional field are educated on a deep, visceral level to a way of life that perpetuates the divisions.

In their writing on the Northern Ireland “Troubles” that kept a level of tension and violence going in those six counties from the 1970s to the 1998 Good Friday Peace Agreement, Sean Farrell and Robert Mulvihill write: “Willed change threatens individuals or groups with loss of identity, thus reinforcing the very aspects of identity one may be trying to change. Willing others to change, unless accompanied by overwhelming force, rarely works because it usually provokes the escalatory process that inhibit reconciliation and resolution.”

I believe that the use of force is a major obstacle to resolving differences between people, whether on a small scale or large. Force begets force, resulting in escalation. As the damage builds up, the number of issues and grievances between combatants increases, fueling further conflict.

Another pitfall is overkill. In his writing on aggression, Edward O. Wilson (On Human Nature, 1978) observes that humans are not only strongly predisposed to slide into deep, irrational hostility when faced with external threats, but also inclined to escalate hostility to a degree that overwhelms the source of the threat by a wide margin.

A third danger is that force hardens the polarization between the parties. Even when force succeeds in controlling others, it is likely to stiffen their inner resistance which waits behind a façade of submission for the opportunity to retaliate. At an extreme of emotional intensity, when both sides of a divided society come to the point of seeing their own survival depending on the elimination of the other, they are both on the road to self-destruction.

Most of the wars in history have to do with land and the resources it provides, the investment of hard work that people make to developing and defending a territory, the emotional attachment we make to home and homeland. On Oct. 8, the day after the Hamas attack that stunned Israel, Roger Cohen wrote: “Whatever the outcome of the war that has just begun, Israel has not, after all, moved beyond the conflict that has haunted it since the creation of the modern state in 1948: the claims of two peoples, Jewish and Palestinian, to the same narrow strip of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.”

It is hard to think of a challenge greater than that: for two peoples of different cultures to live in proximity and co-exist peacefully on a small parcel of land in the Middle East. Yet there have been times in these past 75 years when many Israelis and Palestinians have done so.

Using force to control others appears to be deep-rooted in human behavior, as we see in the wars, invasions, conquests, colonial rule, genocides, and slavery that pervade human history. There are lessons to be learned from this history about basic human nature, and in particular the way humans respond to forcible control. This knowledge is of utmost importance, especially for those in leadership positions who have the power to make decisions that seriously impact thousands of lives.

Of course, people will bring up the need to defend ourselves from an aggressor, which is often necessary, but Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. with their adherence to the principle of nonviolence, and the organizing of the Civil Rights Movement, showed us a very different alternative.   

If there is hope of finding a path to peace for Israel and Palestine, a key ingredient will be the quality of leadership. Both societies are suffering now from what I and some others see as the worst leadership they have ever had. Both are desperately in need of identifying their most reasonable, responsible, principled members and putting them in leader positions.

That applies, of course, to our own country as well.

Stephanie Ferrera, MSW, became a partner in Center for Family Consultation in 1980. She is in private practice of individual, marital, and family therapy in Oak Park.